Voxengo is pleased to announce the release of Elephant version 4, a mastering limiter plugin for professional audio and sound production applications, available in AudioUnit, VST and VST3 plug-in formats (including native 64-bit support), for Mac OS X (v10.5 and later), and Windows computers.

Voxengo Elephant is a mastering limiter plug-in for professional music production applications. The most remarkable feature of this signal limiter is its sonic transparency. Elephant brings sound limiting and loudness maximization without audible “pumping” sonic artifacts.

Elephant is a highly competitive plug-in for mastering applications: it features a variety of limiter modes that can be deeply customized, and a comprehensive set of level metering tools, including headroom estimation and K-system metering. Elephant's built-in linear-phase oversampling is an important element in achieving high-quality peak limiting and loudness maximization without inter-sample overshoots.

Elephant limiter can be used for mixing and mastering of both stereo and multi-channel music and sound material, at any standard sample rate. Limiting process can be visualized both as gain reduction meter and real-time graph.

Elephant, also featuring a DC offset filter, and a high-quality bit-depth converter with an optional noise-shaping, allows you to finish your music and audio productions with a spark!

Elephant features:

Transparent signal limiting action

9 predefined limiter modes

Limiter mode editor

Optional release stage

Noise-shaped bit-depth converter

DC offset removal filter

Waveform graph view

Stereo and multi-channel processing

Internal channel routing

Channel grouping

Up to 8x linear-phase oversampling

64-bit floating point processing

Preset manager

Undo/redo history

A/B comparisons

Contextual hint messages

All sample rates support

22 ms compensated processing latency

Elephant 4.0, which is backwards-compatible, includes the following changes since version 3:

Added a new "EL-4" limiter mode, with less harmonic coloration.

Added a new "Dynamic Release Control" limiter stage.

Added a new "Timing" limiter mode parameter.

Added a new "Release to Attack Ratio" limiter mode parameter.

Added a new "Release Shape" limiter mode parameter.

Added input level meter together with the threshold mark.

Implemented the "Eval" limiter's evaluation mode.

Added the "Trans View" transient visualization.

Made the "In Gain" and "Out Gain" knob ranges more practical.

Magnified the "Out Gain" knob's scale around 0 dB.

Made changes to the "Trans Time" parameter stutter-free.

The output statistics are now automatically reset if any parameter that influences the output statistics was changed.

Added "EL-4", "COMPACT" and "EXPANDED" factory limiter modes.

Introductory price of USD 99.95 will be effective for two weeks from now, which is 15% off the regular price of USD 119.95. Upgrading from the previous version costs USD 49.95 if previous version was purchased earlier than 180 days from now: otherwise the upgrade is free during this grace period. Demo version of Elephant can be downloaded freely at the Voxengo web site: http://www.voxengo.com/product/elephant/

bmanic
on Feb 21, 2014, 1:03am:

Haven't written anything on these forums in a long time but I thought I have to come here too and congratulate Aleksey on this fantastic release! I know that v4 of Elephant has been long in the making but suffice to say that it has been very much worth the wait. Elephant is yet again king of the hill! Congratulations! :)

Awesome news! Also glad you remembered people which bought V3 few weeks ago :) Keep up the great work!

uvasonar
on Feb 22, 2014, 2:46pm:

OK, I have read enough. As I found myself using Elephant 3 on each and every project for years now - at least somwhere in a bus - plus it seems Aleksey has really worked out more great features, I will buy version 4 in a second.

tmm
on Feb 22, 2014, 6:14pm:

Just tested the new MK4 version and noticed a feature, which I like very much:

The wave graphics !

I seem to have overlooked that in the Elephant 3 version.

But this is great.

The wavewindow directly tells you, if you compress too hard so the waveform gets flattened out at the top end.

I still like the clean silverish optics of the older version, but since we are allowed to keep both product keys, we always have the choice.

After working with the new version for an hour or so, my first impression is very good, but I do have a serious request: Please restore the version 3 Input and Output Gain ranges - particularly the Output range.

Changing these in the new version means that it is not precisely backwards compatible with v. 3, There are some cases where I find having an output gain lower than -12 dB is quite useful (when setting up parallel streams of limited and unlimited material; when applying radical level control on the input to a reverberator..., I can go on).

Quite a few of my existing projects make use of these "extreme" settings, and it would be nice to just be able to plug in the new version without having to twiddle with settings in an attempt to recreate the old sound - or worse, having to reinstall version 3 for some projects, even if it's only to make written notes of the settings.

I'm guessing it took a fair amount of work to implement the finer degree of control of the Output Gain around the 0 dB mark, but could this not be achieved by having the use of a modifier key (Control, Alt...) that when pressed would instigate a finer mode of change when dragging with the mouse?

An easy answer would be to change the name of the new version, so that host programs would see versions 3 and 4 as two separate plugins which can co-exist, but the better answer would be to restore the old ranges. Please consider this.